FORT KENT, Maine — You can tell it’s nearing fall in northern Maine when every conversation begins, “Got your wood in yet?” (Note: This salutation is seasonal and rotates semi-annually with the traditional spring greeting: “Got your garden in yet?”)
At my house, wood is the primary heat source and since living in northern Maine means heating a house for a majority of the year, it’s safe to say the finding, cutting, loading, splitting and piling of firewood is high on my end-of-summer to-do list.
Of course, those who know me well know firewood is more than a seasonal chore — it’s an all-consuming, overriding obsession that begins around the time the final embers from the previous season’s fires are dying out.
Frankly, not worrying about firewood is a bit like believing you can be too rich or too thin. Those people have never been fat, poor or staring at an empty wood room in March.
Since a majority of my property is in a wooded area, it seems silly to spend my hard-earned dollars on firewood.
Not that that stopped me when, in the midst of a firewood panic attack in March, I called and ordered four cords of stove-length wood.
Never mind there was still a good supply of perfectly good wood down in the basement. Where there’s an obsession, there is a discernable lack of rhyme or reason.
The amount ordered — four cords — was not based on any wood-usage calculation on my part.
Though it shames me to admit it, I have very little grasp of exactly how much wood I use during a winter, or what a standard wood measurement — a cord — even looks like.
All I knew was that the pile was going down with each log tossed into the wood stove.
Sure, people have told me that a cord is a pile of wood measuring 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet, but can I wrap my spatially challenged mind around that? Nope.
When the delivery arrived and a very large dump truck deposited a load next to the house, that was my first introduction into exactly how much wood is in a standard cord.
As I stood staring up at this mountain of maple, spruce and beech wondering if it all would even fit in the wood room, the deliveryman said, “I’ll be back with the rest later today.”
That was when several of my friends expressed concern that the time was coming when they would open the refrigerator or kitchen cupboards at my place only to see chunks of wood that I had stuffed inside in my firewood-gathering frenzy.
Last year, I got a bit smarter and arranged for my woodsman neighbor to cut some trees on my land for me and another neighbor to delimb them and drag them into a field where, in my mind, they could be cut into usable chunks in quick order.
I even went out and bought a shiny new chainsaw to do the job.
By the time he was done piling up the tree-length logs, I was staring at two piles of what was estimated to be about 20 cords of wood. Not even I could go through that in a winter.
Luckily, since my other neighbor was sharing half of it, that left me with just 10 cords to cut, haul to the house, split and toss into the cellar.
So, that’s what my friend Bob and I have been doing for the past month. Bob is retired and claims he actually enjoys sawing up firewood as a break from golf and his own household chores.
All I can say is, if not for him, I would still be staring at 10 cords worth of uncut logs.
Our firewood cutting has fallen into a loose routine.
On the days he can come and cut, we head out to the woodlot in the morning with chainsaws, gas, bar-oil, files and related accoutrements in hand.
Once there, Bob gets right to work and I join him about a half-hour later.
This is because it takes me about 20 minutes to put on my safety gear — and whenever I’m doing anything that involves gas-powered tools with sharp, spinning blades, there is no such thing as too much safety gear.
On go the steel-toed boots, the bright red Kevlar chaps, the ear protectors and the gloves.
Then, looking and feeling like a cross between Clint Eastwood and Gumby, I spend another 10 to 15 minutes trying to start the chainsaw.
Finally, after finding the right combination of choke, pulls on the cord and swearing in two languages, the saw roars to life and I begin to actually cut the wood — at a rate of about one log to every four or five of Bob’s.
And let me just say this about that — there is no ache in the world quite like that felt by dormant muscles forced into chainsaw labor.By the time the eighth or so truckload was brought to the house, the cheerful observation of “well, this is why wood warms you more than once” had me muttering under my breath through clenched teeth.
About halfway through the process this year I discovered an online calculator, compliments of the state of Maine (http://www.maine.gov/ag/firewood.html) to help figure how much wood is in the cellar thus far.
Tape measure in hand, I carefully plotted the length, height and depth of each pile and fed that information into the calculator.
At this point I have about 4 cords of wood inside. This is not counting what’s piled up just outside next to the house or what remains in the woodlot in need of splitting or, for that matter, what’s on the porch left over from last year.
Further measurements and careful calculations tell me that when I have every available wood area in the cellar stuffed full, I’ll have about 7.5 cords at my heating disposal.
Given that I’m heating about a 1,500-square-foot space, which two years ago was upgraded with super energy-efficient windows, that really should be enough.
Then again, there’s an empty old garage not far from the house that would make a dandy woodshed.
Obsessed? Some may say I am. And to that I say: Let them say it.
For now, I’m off to measure the vegetable bin in the refrigerator to see just how much kindling would fit there. You won’t catch me running out of wood this winter.
